London: Day 7 (May 19, 2012)

 This morning Charly got up early (on her day off) and met me at the underground and escorted me to the train station to catch the train/bus to Huddersfield.  She's amazing!   As I was walking to the underground one of the porters in my building asked me where I was going and I told him Huddersfield.  He laughed and said he had never heard that one before and wanted to know why I was going there.  I told him I had a friend that lived there.  Then Charly kept kind of chuckling about how now I couldn’t go to the lake country or to Preston and that there was nothing in Huddersfield.  But I want to make it know that Huddersfield is a DELIGHTFUL place!  I had a fantastic 24 hours there!

Huddersfield is about an hour’s drive from Haworth, which is where the Brontë family lived.  So we went to what is now called the Brontë Village (a tourist trap) and took a tour of the Brontë Parsonage.  Just in case your high school teachers didn’t make you read 19^th Century British literature, let me clarify.  Charlotte Brontë is most known for her novel, Jane Eyre and her sister Emily Brontë is most known for her novel, Wuthering Heights.  Anyway, the restored Parsonage (their father was a parson) was pretty much like most restored homes/museums.  Towards the end of out tour the church bells started to ring.  It was really awesome and gave our tour such authenticity.  The Parsonage is next door to the church so they were really loud.  Darren said that there must be a wedding or something, because they only ring church bells for services or for other special occasions.  When we came out to the front of the parsonage, there was a bride and groom having their wedding pictures taken.  She must have been a die hard Brontë fan.  But it was awesome to hear the church bells.

But what I found most fascinating was seeing the country side that is so often described in these novels as well as others.  Things like the heath and the moors.  I know have seen them.  It is a lean countryside that is rough, cold and overcast more than it is sunny, whereas the country side I saw on the bus and train down closer to London was lush and full of trees and foliage.  Heath refers to a kind of foliage, mostly heather.  It kind of reminds me of the sagebrush in Utah.  Here is some heath with the local sheep.

Moors are large flat hills.  You can see them in the distance.  The pictures just don’t do justice to how beautiful it really is.  The moors are in the very back of this picture in the haze. 

Also I was very taken with these stone fences.  Darren said they are call dry stonewall.  They are made with out any cement.  The stones are just stacked.  Apparently, there is an trick or an art to it and you can take classes to learn how to build dry stonewall fences.

Also, Huddersfield is a town that was built up around a textile mill of the industrial revolution.  Yes, it very much made me think of Gaskell’s North and South.  The mills are still there but they have all been turned into other things like schools or commercial space.  The house that I stayed in was the home that was built for one of the mill managers.

Darren was performing his one man show at the church that evening so we drove back from Haworth and then set everything up for his show.  He did a great job.  I was really impressed by first of all how he memorized all of that and that he was able to keep our attention that long.  It was fantastic.